quote:

Originally posted by slosig:
When you hit that link it says $9.60? When I hit it, it says $25.69, not available at Lowe’s Paso Robles, not available for delivery.

And when I hit it it says $15.73.

As far as time goes, most charge transit time and any time picking supplies. The clock doesn't start when they ring your bell. Unless it's a flat rate charge such as a standard service call.

How can the same piece of pipe at the same store chain, vary 150% in price from location to location.....I could see 20-30% for travel to a far store from where the pipe comes in, but not that much.

BUT, the Grade of pipe Gustofer linked to is a cheap/crappy Grade that NO professional plumber would use.

Most of what Lowe's sells is actually a cheap foam core with a thin layer of PVC lining it. If you go to a real plumbing store, and get pipe that is solid PVC, it's about 3x more expensive. Without seeing what he put in, I can't comment as to which he used... but if he used real PVC (which is what I would use), it's going to be more expensive than the cheap Lowe's stuff. At my local Lowe's, you can't even buy the good stuff, but I'm sure that varies region to region. Also, you're going to pay for his time to collect materials. Whether he added that all in on the last invoice, or broke it up... either way, if he's running for parts, you should expect to pay for that on a time and material job.

I had an air-conditioning guy charge me $75.00 for a capacitor that I could buy on line for $14.95 shipped. It was the exact brand and number. That didn't include the $100 service call. I don't know if that makes you feel any better.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:

quote:

Originally posted by wreckdiver:
Just looked at my price book from the plumbing shop that I do most of my business with. My cost on 4" PVC is $24.43 for 10' and I am suggested to charge to 32.58 per 10'. I find it hard to believe you can buy it for $.96. I think your comparing different types of PVC.

Wow. You're getting raped on prices out there.

This is what he used.

https://www.lowes.com/pd/Charl...PVC-DWV-Pipe/3133049

That's kinda shitty PVC. Are you sure that's what he used?

Hey, I know all about the "$20 here, $50 there, another $120" that all start to add up. Trust me, I do!

I rather use or have someone else use quality parts that are reliable than some cheap shit.

You're in Montana, it gets COLD up there. That drain pipe cracks in the cold, you're probably going to have a bad day. Then you get the joy of having someone come out there and fix it again... If he uses the proper PVC, which is more expensive, you don't have that problem.

quote:

Originally posted by a1abdj:

quote:

Maybe you posted the incorrect link ... the one in your post shows $25.56 for a 10 feet piece.

I think they know where you're at, and when you click on the link you're seeing the price at your local store. I'm seeing $13.21 on my end.

$21.87 when I click it, but solid PVC pipe the same size is $13.60.

The bill seems fine to me. How else is the plumber going to pay for his tools?

How much less money do you think plumbers should make?

They're middle class working guys.

quote:

How much less money do you think plumbers should make?

Go check out the thread on gun dealers selling in volume. According to some, those who provide goods or services should be lucky to make $1.00 and be grateful for it.

I wonder how long it will be before the internet can plumb a house.

quote:

Originally posted by a1abdj:

quote:

How much less money do you think plumbers should make?

Go check out the thread on gun dealers selling in volume. According to some, those who provide goods or services should be lucky to make $1.00 and be grateful for it.

I wonder how long it will be before the internet can plumb a house.

This is where the Internet has generated problems.
The Internet Price Ninja's think they know it all.

I had a bid on an outdoor/indoor WiFi project recently requiring quite a few parameters.
Unfortunately in order to accurately quote a price you have to actually do part of the work in engineering the project.
Several hours of work in fact not including all the time to procure products which is very time consuming.
The money for this would come back if you get the bid.

Well, I made a mistake of including an accurate Bill of Materials with part numbers.
The A hole has one of his flunkies go Google everything and put down part prices that were basically at my cost.
About half of the project price was in these parts.

I declined the project.

Live and learn.

Price for this and that...

Retail vs. Delivery/Installation by Service Company

If you don't know the companies pricing structure, you won't have a clear picture.

There's so many variables when it comes to material pricing... you are either happy with the quality of service you received or you're not. Getting quick and quality service comes with a higher cost.

Finding quality service, provided by a tech which you trust is rare... so pick your battles.

quote:

Originally posted by Excam_Man:
Price for this and that...

Retail vs. Delivery/Installation by Service Company

If you don't know the companies pricing structure, you won't have a clear picture.

There's so many variables when it comes to material pricing... you are either happy with the quality of service you received or you're not. Getting quick and quality service comes with a higher cost.

Finding quality service, provided by a tech which you trust is rare... so pick your battles.

When having someone come out like this plumber, you can get 3 different traits:
Cheap
Reliable (comes out when they say they will)
Knowledgeable or skilled (does quality work)

But you only get 2 out 3,always. I choose reliable and knowledgeable every time.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
The A hole has one of his flunkies go Google everything and put down part prices that were basically at my cost.

I guess this is something that I don't understand. Parts are parts. Should I, the consumer, have to pay 20, 30, or 300% higher prices on a widget if you bring it with you rather than me buying it on my own from the local hardware store? It just doesn't seem right to me.

I'm paying you for your labor (at least that was my understanding) to do something that I can't or don't want to do, and I am perfectly fine with that. You are trained to nail those two widgets together and you deserve to be paid what you want to do that. But, in my apparently unpopular opinion you don't deserve to be paid three times the cost of those widgets when I can drive down to the hardware store and buy them for 1/3 what you want to charge me for them. It seems excessive to me. I wonder why?

Can you charge extra for the cost of getting them or for having them delivered? Absolutely. Within reason. Apparently my "within reason" differs from most.

As an example, if someone asked me to build them a chicken coop, I'd buy the lumber and the nails and charge them what I paid for them in addition to my labor...because that's what they are paying me for...my labor. If I paid $20 for a box of nails, it wouldn't even dawn on me to charge them $60 for those nails. It's all part of the job in my mind.

My electrician who ran the 100A wire to the shop charged me for labor and the cost of the wire (I bought the subpanel and breakers). Seems to me that that is how things are done. Apparently I'm wrong and he's an anomaly.

Like I said before, lesson learned.

quote:

Originally posted by jimmy123x:
Thank the Lord the owners I work for NEVER question the bill and most of the time tip on top of it.......I wouldn't have the patience for this nickel and diming.

Well, I suspect anyone who owns a fucking yacht has the luxury to not question any bills. Me? I'll do the "nickel and diming" thank you very much.

quote:

Originally posted by zingo:
How much less money do you think plumbers should make?

Oh, cry me a river.

Let's see... I did every single bit of prep work (digging the trench from under the house to the shop and the ditch for the drain). All he had to do was lay roughly 100 ft of pipe from the house to the shop and glue together a couple of pieces of PVC. I did all of the backfilling. For that I was charged $1400 and 13 hours of labor when it was roughly 3-4 hours of actual work and maybe $200 worth of material. And, no, it's not even hooked into the water line yet. I'll be having someone else do that.

Is that enough for you? Or maybe I should have been happy if he charged me $2000 or $3000? Or perhaps I could pay off his truck for him or maybe make a couple of mortgage payments for him too.
Would you be happy then?

quote:

They're middle class working guys.

So am I, and I don't appreciate being raped, cheated, and lied to.

you make it sound so easy why didn't you just hook it up yourself ? not trying to be a smartass just wondering?

quote:

Originally posted by XLT:
you make it sound so easy why didn't you just hook it up yourself ? not trying to be a smartass just wondering?

Truth be told, I could have done what was done myself.

If I had it to do over I would have. I hired him to "do the plumbing from the house to the shop". I figured it'd be best to have a professional do this right the first time.

I'm not kidding at all by saying all that he did was lay the pipe in the ditch and glue together the lengths of PVC for the drain and put them into the trench.

This is why I'm a bit bent out of shape for the bill that I was expecting to be a few hundred bucks.

All this and the job wasn't even finished in that $1400 and 13 hours.

^^^^ Charging 13 hours for 4 hours worth of work, that's what you should be bent out of shape about. The part about "expecting it to be a few hundred bucks" though has me wondering what you talked to him about before he started. Did he bid the job?

Let me tell you about the time I charged a guy $600 for a 9 volt battery. A raping so epic, I still tell the story whenever possible.

I get a call on Thanksgiving a few years back. Right in the middle of dinner. "HELP!" said the restaurant owner. His safe wouldn't open, and they were in the middle of dinner rush. Due to the holiday there were no neighboring businesses to borrow money from, so he had to get the safe open.

Being the nice guy I am, I spent several minutes with him on the phone trying to diagnose what his issue was. I asked him if he had replaced the battery with a Duracell or Energizer. He answered in the affirmative, so we ruled out a power problem.

He needed me to come out. Right away. I told him that an emergency opening on a holiday was going to run between $600 and $1,000. He agreed and I left to open the safe.

I arrive roughly 30 minutes after we got off the phone. We go into the office, enter the combination, and the safe doesn't open. I pop the battery box and what do I see? Some cheap piece of crap battery from the gas station across the street. Remember when I asked him on the phone if he had used a Duracell or Energizer and he answered in the affirmative?

I whip out a shiny new Duracell, plug it in, enter the combination, and the safe opens right up. Total time on site, 1 minute. Bill: $600. The guy about flipped out. "You were only here for a few minutes!" "That's outrageous!" "I could have done that myself!"

Yes, but you didn't. Not only that, but had you done what I told you to do while we were on the phone and it had worked, I would have not even charged you a penny. I told him what the minimum charge was, and completed the task.

$600 for a battery? Not really.

My work trucks aren't free. The fuel isn't free. The insurance isn't free. My licenses aren't free. My knowledge wasn't gained for free. My phones aren't free. My tools aren't free. He wasn't really paying me $600 for a battery. He was paying me $600 to use my million dollar investment to rectify his problem.

And if you think that $600 sounds expensive, you should hear what I charge to stand around work sites and supervise others when we pull out vault doors. It's not inexpensive, but when I'm there nothing is getting broken and nobody is getting killed.

Sometimes my parts cost more from my distributors that I can buy them on e-bay. I have to use my money to buy those parts. I have to store those parts. I have to sell those parts to my customers because I know which parts they need, and how to put them in. I then have to warranty my work. I'm not doing this for $1.00.

Want me to install your parts? No problem. Also no warranty. You can deal with that yourself since you're not paying me to assume those risks.

I'm assuming most of you guys work as employees for some sort of company. Do you think if your company operated in the same way you expect others to operate that you'd have a job? How could they pay you if they weren't making money? How could they make money if they were doing everything at or near cost?

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:
I did every single bit of prep work (digging the trench from under the house to the shop and the ditch for the drain). All he had to do was lay roughly 100 ft of pipe from the house to the shop and glue together a couple of pieces of PVC. I did all of the backfilling. For that I was charged $1400 and 13 hours of labor when it was roughly 3-4 hours of actual work and maybe $200 worth of material. And, no, it's not even hooked into the water line yet. I'll be having someone else do that.

Holy crud, what did he actually do, and why did you have him do it? At 4” from a house to a shop, that sounds like a drain line, so the trench is not only the hard part, but pretty important as you want to get your 2% fall or you are liable to have problems. Not even hooked into the water line? Is this a water line or a drain line? I’m confused about what you were even asking him to do.

quote:

Originally posted by slosig:
Holy crud, what did he actually do, and why did you have him do it? At 4” from a house to a shop, that sounds like a drain line, so the trench is not only the hard part, but pretty important as you want to get your 2% fall or you are liable to have problems. Not even hooked into the water line? Is this a water line or a drain line? I’m confused about what you were even asking him to do.

The drain is just a 4" gray water floor drain in the middle of the shop which drains out to the air about 10 feet behind it (the shop). There's also a "Y" in that with some 4" drain pipe to the future sink. Water to the shop will be coming from the line under the house, eventually, once it's hooked up.

quote:

Originally posted by Gustofer:

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
The A hole has one of his flunkies go Google everything and put down part prices that were basically at my cost.

I guess this is something that I don't understand. Parts are parts. Should I, the consumer, have to pay 20, 30, or 300% higher prices on a widget if you bring it with you rather than me buying it on my own from the local hardware store? It just doesn't seem right to me.

I'm paying you for your labor (at least that was my understanding) to do something that I can't or don't want to do, and I am perfectly fine with that. You are trained to nail those two widgets together and you deserve to be paid what you want to do that. But, in my apparently unpopular opinion you don't deserve to be paid three times the cost of those widgets when I can drive down to the hardware store and buy them for 1/3 what you want to charge me for them. It seems excessive to me. I wonder why?

Can you charge extra for the cost of getting them or for having them delivered? Absolutely. Within reason. Apparently my "within reason" differs from most.

As an example, if someone asked me to build them a chicken coop, I'd buy the lumber and the nails and charge them what I paid for them in addition to my labor...because that's what they are paying me for...my labor. If I paid $20 for a box of nails, it wouldn't even dawn on me to charge them $60 for those nails. It's all part of the job in my mind.

My electrician who ran the 100A wire to the shop charged me for labor and the cost of the wire (I bought the subpanel and breakers). Seems to me that that is how things are done. Apparently I'm wrong and he's an anomaly.

Like I said before, lesson learned.

quote:

Originally posted by jimmy123x:
Thank the Lord the owners I work for NEVER question the bill and most of the time tip on top of it.......I wouldn't have the patience for this nickel and diming.

Well, I suspect anyone who owns a fucking yacht has the luxury to not question any bills. Me? I'll do the "nickel and diming" thank you very much.

quote:

Originally posted by zingo:
How much less money do you think plumbers should make?

Oh, cry me a river.

Let's see... I did every single bit of prep work (digging the trench from under the house to the shop and the ditch for the drain). All he had to do was lay roughly 100 ft of pipe from the house to the shop and glue together a couple of pieces of PVC. I did all of the backfilling. For that I was charged $1400 and 13 hours of labor when it was roughly 3-4 hours of actual work and maybe $200 worth of material. And, no, it's not even hooked into the water line yet. I'll be having someone else do that.

Is that enough for you? Or maybe I should have been happy if he charged me $2000 or $3000? Or perhaps I could pay off his truck for him or maybe make a couple of mortgage payments for him too.
Would you be happy then?

quote:

They're middle class working guys.

So am I, and I don't appreciate being raped, cheated, and lied to.

You just don't get it. I'm in the Yacht Management business and do repairs on yachts with a myriad of different systems. Parts are not parts. My wholesale price on parts (which I get the deepest discounts) are half of the time a higher price than you may be able to get a part on EBAY. BUT, they're not the same part. The part on EBAY is either some old part that some dealer has had stuck on their shelf for 10 years, or in some owners bilge, or a reconditioned model that is not mentioned that it's reconditioned, or an old model that has been superseded by a new model to correct a design flaw, or even a Chinese copy.

When my part that I installed fails prematurely I warranty it, and warranty the labor. I stand behind it. Nobody reimburses me the labor and many times warrantying it out means I have to purchase a new one to fix the customers issue NOW, send in the old one on my dime, and wait 2 months to get it back and now have a part that's going to sit on my shelf for months to years.

The other things is I stock thousands of dollars of parts in my truck, so I don't have to run out to a parts store for stuff like a hose clamp or electrical terminal, etc. I have $1000 just in all of the various electrical terminals, fuses etc., $500 in premium s/s hose clamps, and on and on in my truck, so I don't have to charge the customer $60 an hour to go get a heatshrink butt connector or fuse, etc. BUT, I am going to make a profit on that item for tieing thousands of dollars of my money up just in parts, not even counting all of the specialty tools I have. If my truck got stolen, who's eating that, me.

I cannot tell you how many owner installed items that have prematurely failed that I have fixed, or 10 year old parts in the package owners have asked me to use over the years. An electrical item IS NOT a 1911 where age doesn't effect it.

Not counting the countless hours spent researching the parts I need, finding them in the wholesalers catalog and placing the order, sometimes having to go to 4 different wholesalers for 1 job to get all of the parts, etc. etc. with my truck, my gas, my insurance and on and on.

On occasion the parts are a lot more than the internet price, because the internet vendor doesn't even stock the part and is having the manufacturer drop ship it when a customer orders it. But YOU need it ASAP so I order it directly from the vender but overnight the part because YOU don't have a week to wait for it.

Do you bring the pizza guy your pizza ingredients and pay him for HIS labor to make you a pizza? Will it turn out the same as his pizza and his chosen ingredients? Or, why not just do it yourself and save the money entirely.

None of my customers are ever raped, cheated, or lied to. EVER. Generally, I price my parts 10% below West Marines prices.

Yes, you saved the plumber some time digging the trench, but the trench is not ready to just drop the pipe into, it has to have a certain pitch and NO sags, otherwise the pipe won't drain correctly, or will clog and/or rot the pipe if there's a sag. SO I'm sure if he's good, he went over the trench and smoothed it all out and made it the correct pitch.

Sorry for the confusion. 1.5 hours overbilled from when he was actually here.

The "3-4 hours of actual work" is my guesstimation for the amount of time it would take me, or anyone with a decent work ethic, to do what he did. The guy spent a lot of time standing around with his thumb up his ass, on smoke breaks, or bullshitting with the builders while they were here. I wasn't planning on all of that time being on the clock.

Should've known better. Next time I'll do things a whole lot different.